Ceasebury: Chapter Forty-One

“Gabriella,” I whispered, “they can’t remove you from here. You are married.”. She nodded. Mr Jameston must have heard me from his position at her left hand as he shouted the same thing as I had said to the crowd. For a very brief moment, the noises stopped. Had they realised that their game had ended? There was no way of forcing a married woman to a place different from her husband.

“But she didn’t have her father’s consent, so the marriage is void.” My mother shouted her expression that of something that had just had a very clever idea pop into its mind. Dorian was in the crowd too, the vague watcher from beyond the edge, with each word, shouted, thinking less and less of me. “Gabriella, I am sending you back to Kingston Grove, you were my word, but you have no place in my house; you are a fallen woman.”

“No!” I shouted back to her. “She can’t go back there.” I said, realising the terrible danger she would be in if she were to be forced to return to Kingston Grove now.

“She is my ward; I can put her wherever I want.” She said.

“Well, her marriage stands.” Said Mr Jameston with a kind of sudden sureness. Everyone turned to look at him. “She did – does – have her father’s consent.”

“Liar!” my mother shouted. “I doubt Lord Kingston even knows of this in his bedridden state.”

“No. Not Lord Kingston.” Said Mr Jameston, visibly swallowing. “Mine.”

“What?” I said in alarm.

“I gave my consent.” He said with a slight nod.

“But you’re not her father!” my mother shouted.

“Yes, I am.” He nodded. “I spent the summer of 1763 with Arabella when she used to come here to collect books from my library. I promised her I wouldn’t tell anyone, even Gabriella until she was married, but she told me a few days ago that she had just found out that Lord Kingston wasn’t her real father from Theodosia and that she wanted to find her real father after all this hiding was over. I have known she is my daughter forever; that’s why I had made such an effect of staying in contact with Theodosia so she could tell me what was happening.”. The enormity of that statement hit me. My dream all made sense now; the dirty blond-haired people in bed together were Lady Kingston – Arabella, as I now knew her – and her lover Edward Jameston. I turned to her sharply to see what her reaction was.

“So, Gabriella, my girl, your father is a man who runs a brothel, your mother was a noblewoman who cuckolded her husband, and you have a half-sister – Chantilly. You were brought to Ceasebury when Lord Kingston found out about your mother’s infidelity to keep you safe, and I’m so sorry that you couldn’t be brought here to be my daughter.”

“That’s wonderful.” Gabriella beamed. “Thank fuck that man is not my father.” She said, turning towards the crowd where Lord Kingston, redder than a British cannon about to shatter a barricade. “And thank you for saving mother.” She smiled with a kind of knowing smile that I had only ever seen creep across my own face in the brief moment between Gabriella coming down to the Creek and me rowing the boat back across the stream to the bank beside the Georgian Summer House. Yes, it was that same smile that I saw in the reflection in the facet of the water when I glimpse that vague imitation of my own being on hot summer days when nothing seemed so finite as death. Or a Revolution. And there was just a stupid blond girl who lived in a chamber across the hall from mine who always said her brother would visit her soon, but he never came and never wrote to her any day of that glorious summer of ’76 when I first heard about some men who had declared something.

What had they declared?

Yes, that was it! They had declared Independence. Which means – if it means anything – that they wanted to be free and un-reliant on the cumbersome expanses of other, distant men who claimed to own them. Yes, every day of that summer of ambition, she insisted that we went out on a walk to The White Woods where she would climb on the branches of a tall willow tree and stare out onto the grounds of a house I never knew anything about – her old home I realise now. And how over the years all that I thought my life was was a story leading up to my marriage to Dorian Kingston. It was never going to be that simple. She was never just a girl who wore yellow, which I now realise must have been a matter of infinite hope. Yes, by wearing yellow, she had been chasing her dream to return to Kingston Grove in the sunshine of the childhood she had spent with her mother, but now she wore red and white, and I knew she had realised that the yellow dream was not something worth striving for. Yellow was not something worth following. But love – red – was. Even as it bleeds out in its scarlet glory over her white dress is worth having. And so every day, we run towards it, hitching up our hooped skirts, and ignore all else in some vain attempt to capture what we must know we cannot keep.

What a cynical approach for one so young and beautiful. No, it is not love we cannot keep; it is all the other things in this horrible and yet hopeful world that we may not hold onto. And if we try, that is when we wear yellow. It is safe to walk down the yellow path through The White Woods, but when we begin to run, our arms reached out further and further, that is when we are doomed to trip and fall and lose the red which we had left back in some other place- in a military letter, or behind the closed double doors of a Summer House, perhaps.

Author Notes: I don't know why this has duplicated so many times, all the copies are exactly the same.

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